Around 1,000 North Koreans died fighting Ukraine in Kursk, officials say

Western officials have told the BBC that North Korean troops have already suffered almost 40% casualties in fighting in Russia’s western Kursk region in just three months.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that of the estimated 11,000 troops sent from North Korea, known as the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), 4,000 were battle casualties.

This term includes those killed, injured, missing or captured. Of the 4,000, officials said around 1,000 were believed to have been killed by mid-January.

These losses, if confirmed, will be unsustainable for the North Koreans.

It is not clear where the wounded are being treated, or even when and to what extent they will be replaced.

But the figures point to an extraordinarily high cost for President Vladimir Putin’s Kim Jong Un-like ally as he seeks to help him dislodge Ukrainian forces from Russia ahead of any potential ceasefire negotiations later in the year.

Ukraine launched a lightning attack on the Russian Kursk Oblast last August, taking Russian border guards by surprise.

The kyiv government made clear at the time that it had no intention of retaining the confiscated territory, but simply using it as a bargaining chip in future peace negotiations.

Since then, Ukraine’s first advances on Kursk have been steadily delayed, in part due to the arrival of the North Koreans in Russia in October.

But Ukraine still holds several hundred square kilometers of Russian territory and is inflicting huge losses on its enemy.

The North Korean troops, supposedly belonging to an “elite” unit called the Storm Corps, appear to have been thrown into the fight with comparatively little training or protection.

“These are barely trained troops led by Russian officers who they don’t understand,” says former British Army tank commander Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon.

“Frankly, they have no chance. They are being thrown into the meat grinder with little chance of survival. They are cannon fodder, and the Russian officers care even less about them than they do about their own men.”

Reports attributed to South Korean intelligence say the North Koreans are unprepared for the realities of modern warfare and appear especially vulnerable to being attacked by Ukrainian first-person view (FPV) drones, a weapon that has been a part Battlespace familiar. for years further south, in the Ukrainian region of Donbass.

Despite this, Ukraine’s top military commander, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, warned earlier this week that North Korean soldiers were posing a major problem for Ukrainian fighters on the front lines.

“They are numerous. Another 11,000-12,000 highly motivated and well-prepared soldiers who are carrying out offensive actions. They operate based on Soviet tactics. They act in platoons, companies. They rely on their numbers,” the general told Ukraine’s TSN Tyzhden. news program.